This reader provides over 40 selections of enduring intellectual value--classic articles, book excerpts, and research studies--that have shaped the study of psychology and our contemporary understanding of it.

Chapter 1. Introducing Psychology

1. William James, from "The Scope of Psychology," Principles of Psychology

"Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like."

2. John B. Watson, from "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," Psychological Review

"Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior."

"In other words, each hemisphere seems to have its own separate and private sensations; its own perceptions; its own concepts; and its own impulses to act, with related volitional, cognitive, and learning experiences."

6. James Olds, from "The Central Nervous System and the Reinforcement of Behavior," American Psychologist

"Brain studies of reward can be expected to provide a basis or at least an introduction to the study of physiological mechanisms underlying learning."

"Our studies suggest that regular motor activity may be important in the treatment of affective disorders. For example, if there is a deficiency of serotonin in some forms of depression, then an increase in tonic motor activity or some form of repetitive motor task, such as riding a bicycle or jogging, may help to relieve the depression."

8. Robert Plomin, from "Environment and Genes: Determinants of Behavior," American Psychologist

"Recent behavioral genetic research has demonstrated that genetic influence on individual differences in behavioral development is usually significant and often substantial and, paradoxically, also supports the important role of the environment."

Chapter 3. Sensation and Perception

9. Kurt Koffka, from "Perception: An Introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie," Psychological Bulletin

"The Gestalt-Theorie is more than a theory of perception: it is even more than a mere psychological theory. Yet it originated in a study of perception and the investigation of this topic has furnished the better part of the experimental work which has been done."

"Human infants under 5 days of age consistently looked more at black-and-white patterns than at plain colored surfaces, which indicates the innate ability to perceive form."

Chapter 4. Sleep and Consciousness

11. Sigmund Freud, from "The Dream as a Wish-Fulfilment," The Interpretation of Dreams

"What animals dream of I do not know. A proverb for which I am indebted to one of my pupils professes to tell us, for it asks the question: 'What does the goose dream of?' and answers: 'Of maize.' The whole theory that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish is contained in these two sentences."

"The fact that these eye movements, EEG pattern, and autonomic nervous system activity are significantly related and do not occur randomly suggests that these physiological phenomena, and probably dreaming, are very likely all manifestations of a particular level of cortical activity which is encountered normally during sleep."

13. J. Allan Hobson and Robert W. McCarley, from "The Brain as a Dream State Generator," American Journal of Psychology

"The new theory cannot yet account for the emotional aspects of the dream experience, but we assume that they are produced by the activation of brain regions subserving affect in parallel with the activation of the better known sensorimotor pathways."

Chapter 5. Learning

14. I.P. Pavlov, from Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral/Cortex, trans. and edited G.V. Anrer

"I have termed this new group of reflexes conditioned reflexes to distinguish them from the inborn or unconditioned reflexes."

"In recent literature various speculations have been entered into concerning the possibility of conditioning various types of emotional response, but direct experimental evidence in support of such a view has been lacking....The present authors have recently put the whole matter to an experimental test."

"The long-term store is assumed to be a permanent repository of information....Thus it is hypothesized that information, once stored in LTS, is never thereafter destroyed or eliminated. Nevertheless, the ability to retrieve information from LTS varies considerably with time and interfering material."

"The present investigation tests recall for individual items after several short intervals. An item is presented and tested without related items intervening."

19. Endel Tulving, from "What Is Episodic Memory?," Current Directions in Psychological Science

"Episodic memory enables a person to remember personally experienced events as such. That is, it makes it possible for a person to be consciously aware of an earlier experience in a certain situation at a certain time."

"How much of the improvement in intellectual performance attributed to the contemporary educational programs is due to the content and methods of the programs and how much is due to the favorable expectancies of the teachers and administrators involved?"

"Concern over sexism in language raises a number of interesting questions for which the psychologist can provide empirical answers. How do people process gender-neutral uses of 'he'? How do they interpret that pronoun when they hear it?"

"The proposition that there are pan-cultural elements in human affect displays appears to be largely supported, both in the literate cultures that we and Izard have studied, and for the most part in the preliterate cultures that we have investigated."

29. Robert J. Sternberg, from "The Ingredients of Love," The Triangle of Love

"A substantial body of evidence...suggests that the components of intimacy, passion, and committment play a key role in love over and above other attributes."

Chapter 10. Human Development

30. Jean Piaget, from "The Stages of the Intellectual Development of the Child," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic

"I shall distinguish four great stages, or four great periods, in the development of intelligence: first, the sensori-motor period before the appearance of language; second, the period from about two to seven years of age, the pre-operational period which precedes real operations; third, the period from seven to 12 years of age, a period of concrete operations (which refers to concrete objects); and finally after 12 years of age, the period of formal operations, or positional operations."

"Whether the context is feeding, close bodily contact, face-to-face interaction, or indeed the situation defined by the infant's crying, mother-infant interaction provides the baby with opportunity to build up expectations of the mother and, eventually, a working model of her as more or less accessible and responsive."

32. Eleanor E. MacCoby, from "Gender and Relationships: A Developmental Account," American Psychologist

"There are certain important ways in which gender is implicated in social behavior--ways that may be obscured or missed altogether when behavior is summed across all categories of social partners."

"I decided to study internal and external control (I-E), the beliefs that rewards come from one's own behavior or from external sources. The initial impetus to study internal-external control came both from an interest in individual differences and from an interest in explaining the way human beings learn complex social situations."

35. Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr., from "Validation of the Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Instruments and Observers," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

"A growing body of research has pointed to the five-factor model as a recurrent and more or less comprehensive taxonomy of personality traits."

36. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, from "Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation," Psychological Review

"Anecdotes suggest that people in Japan and America may hold strikingly divergent construals of the self, others, and the interdependence of the two."

Chapter 12. Stress and Adjustment

37. Hans Selye, from "The Evolution of the Stress Concept," American Scientist

"Stress is the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it."

38. Richard S. Lazarus, from "Puzzles in the Study of Daily Hassles," Journal of Behavioral Medicine

"Our approach, consistent with the way we have defined psychological stress in general, is that daily hassles are experiences and conditions of daily living that have been appraised as salient and harmful or threatening to the endorser's well-being."

Chapter 13. Abnormal Behavior

39. D. L. Rosenhan, from "On Being Sane in Insane Places," Science

"At its heart, the question of whether the sane can be distinguished from the insane...is a simple matter: do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?"

40. Sigmund Freud, from Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety

"If the structure and origin of anxiety are as described, the next question is: what is the function of anxiety and on what occasions is it reproduced? The answer seems to be obvious and convincing: anxiety arose originally as a reaction to a state of danger and it is reproduced whenever a state of that kind recurs."

"I believe that cure for depression occurs when the individual comes to believe that he is not helpless and that an individual's susceptibility to depression depends on the success or failure of his previous experience with controlling his environment."

Chapter 14. Therapy

42. Carl R. Rogers, from "Some Hypothesis Regarding the Facilitation of Personal Growth," On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

"I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence, as follows. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur."

"However, cognitive therapy may be defined more narrowly as a set of operations focused on a patient's cognitions (verbal or pictorial) and on the premises, assumptions, and attitudes underlying these cognitions. This section will describe the specific techniques of cognitive therapy."

44. Martin E.P. Seligman, from "The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy: The Consumer Reports Study," American Psychologist

"How do we find out whether psychotherapy works? To answer this, two methods have arisen: the efficacy study and the effectiveness study."

Chapter 15. Social Psychology

45. Stanley Milgram, from "Behavioral Study of Obedience," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

"Of the 40 subjects, 26 obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the the shock generator."

46. John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, from "When Will People Help in a Crisis?," Psychology Today

"If each member of a group of bystanders is aware that other people are also present, he will be less likely to notice the emergency, less likely to decide that it is an emergency, and less likely to act even if he thinks there is an emergency."

47. Muzafer Sherif, from "Superordinate Goals in the Reduction of Intergroup Conflict," The American Journal of Sociology

"When groups co-operate in the attainment of superordinate goals, leaders are in a position to take bolder steps toward bringing about understanding and harmonious relations."

48. Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila Ross, from "Imitation of Film-Mediated Aggressive Models," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

"The results of the present study provide strong evidence that exposure to filmed aggression heightens aggressive reactions in children."

This reader provides over 40 selections of enduring intellectual value--classic articles, book excerpts, and research studies--that have shaped the study of psychology and our contemporary understanding of it.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introducing Psychology

1. William James, from "The Scope of Psychology," Principles of Psychology

"Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like."

2. John B. Watson, from "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," Psychological Review

"Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior."

"In other words, each hemisphere seems to have its own separate and private sensations; its own perceptions; its own concepts; and its own impulses to act, with related volitional, cognitive, and learning experiences."

6. James Olds, from "The Central Nervous System and the Reinforcement of Behavior," American Psychologist

"Brain studies of reward can be expected to provide a basis or at least an introduction to the study of physiological mechanisms underlying learning."

"Our studies suggest that regular motor activity may be important in the treatment of affective disorders. For example, if there is a deficiency of serotonin in some forms of depression, then an increase in tonic motor activity or some form of repetitive motor task, such as riding a bicycle or jogging, may help to relieve the depression."

8. Robert Plomin, from "Environment and Genes: Determinants of Behavior," American Psychologist

"Recent behavioral genetic research has demonstrated that genetic influence on individual differences in behavioral development is usually significant and often substantial and, paradoxically, also supports the important role of the environment."

Chapter 3. Sensation and Perception

9. Kurt Koffka, from "Perception: An Introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie," Psychological Bulletin

"The Gestalt-Theorie is more than a theory of perception: it is even more than a mere psychological theory. Yet it originated in a study of perception and the investigation of this topic has furnished the better part of the experimental work which has been done."

"Human infants under 5 days of age consistently looked more at black-and-white patterns than at plain colored surfaces, which indicates the innate ability to perceive form."

Chapter 4. Sleep and Consciousness

11. Sigmund Freud, from "The Dream as a Wish-Fulfilment," The Interpretation of Dreams

"What animals dream of I do not know. A proverb for which I am indebted to one of my pupils professes to tell us, for it asks the question: 'What does the goose dream of?' and answers: 'Of maize.' The whole theory that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish is contained in these two sentences."

"The fact that these eye movements, EEG pattern, and autonomic nervous system activity are significantly related and do not occur randomly suggests that these physiological phenomena, and probably dreaming, are very likely all manifestations of a particular level of cortical activity which is encountered normally during sleep."

13. J. Allan Hobson and Robert W. McCarley, from "The Brain as a Dream State Generator," American Journal of Psychology

"The new theory cannot yet account for the emotional aspects of the dream experience, but we assume that they are produced by the activation of brain regions subserving affect in parallel with the activation of the better known sensorimotor pathways."

Chapter 5. Learning

14. I.P. Pavlov, from Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral/Cortex, trans. and edited G.V. Anrer

"I have termed this new group of reflexes conditioned reflexes to distinguish them from the inborn or unconditioned reflexes."

"In recent literature various speculations have been entered into concerning the possibility of conditioning various types of emotional response, but direct experimental evidence in support of such a view has been lacking....The present authors have recently put the whole matter to an experimental test."

"The long-term store is assumed to be a permanent repository of information....Thus it is hypothesized that information, once stored in LTS, is never thereafter destroyed or eliminated. Nevertheless, the ability to retrieve information from LTS varies considerably with time and interfering material."

"The present investigation tests recall for individual items after several short intervals. An item is presented and tested without related items intervening."

19. Endel Tulving, from "What Is Episodic Memory?," Current Directions in Psychological Science

"Episodic memory enables a person to remember personally experienced events as such. That is, it makes it possible for a person to be consciously aware of an earlier experience in a certain situation at a certain time."

"How much of the improvement in intellectual performance attributed to the contemporary educational programs is due to the content and methods of the programs and how much is due to the favorable expectancies of the teachers and administrators involved?"

"Concern over sexism in language raises a number of interesting questions for which the psychologist can provide empirical answers. How do people process gender-neutral uses of 'he'? How do they interpret that pronoun when they hear it?"

"The proposition that there are pan-cultural elements in human affect displays appears to be largely supported, both in the literate cultures that we and Izard have studied, and for the most part in the preliterate cultures that we have investigated."

29. Robert J. Sternberg, from "The Ingredients of Love," The Triangle of Love

"A substantial body of evidence...suggests that the components of intimacy, passion, and committment play a key role in love over and above other attributes."

Chapter 10. Human Development

30. Jean Piaget, from "The Stages of the Intellectual Development of the Child," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic

"I shall distinguish four great stages, or four great periods, in the development of intelligence: first, the sensori-motor period before the appearance of language; second, the period from about two to seven years of age, the pre-operational period which precedes real operations; third, the period from seven to 12 years of age, a period of concrete operations (which refers to concrete objects); and finally after 12 years of age, the period of formal operations, or positional operations."

"Whether the context is feeding, close bodily contact, face-to-face interaction, or indeed the situation defined by the infant's crying, mother-infant interaction provides the baby with opportunity to build up expectations of the mother and, eventually, a working model of her as more or less accessible and responsive."

32. Eleanor E. MacCoby, from "Gender and Relationships: A Developmental Account," American Psychologist

"There are certain important ways in which gender is implicated in social behavior--ways that may be obscured or missed altogether when behavior is summed across all categories of social partners."

"I decided to study internal and external control (I-E), the beliefs that rewards come from one's own behavior or from external sources. The initial impetus to study internal-external control came both from an interest in individual differences and from an interest in explaining the way human beings learn complex social situations."

35. Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr., from "Validation of the Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Instruments and Observers," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

"A growing body of research has pointed to the five-factor model as a recurrent and more or less comprehensive taxonomy of personality traits."

36. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, from "Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation," Psychological Review

"Anecdotes suggest that people in Japan and America may hold strikingly divergent construals of the self, others, and the interdependence of the two."

Chapter 12. Stress and Adjustment

37. Hans Selye, from "The Evolution of the Stress Concept," American Scientist

"Stress is the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it."

38. Richard S. Lazarus, from "Puzzles in the Study of Daily Hassles," Journal of Behavioral Medicine

"Our approach, consistent with the way we have defined psychological stress in general, is that daily hassles are experiences and conditions of daily living that have been appraised as salient and harmful or threatening to the endorser's well-being."

Chapter 13. Abnormal Behavior

39. D. L. Rosenhan, from "On Being Sane in Insane Places," Science

"At its heart, the question of whether the sane can be distinguished from the insane...is a simple matter: do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?"

40. Sigmund Freud, from Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety

"If the structure and origin of anxiety are as described, the next question is: what is the function of anxiety and on what occasions is it reproduced? The answer seems to be obvious and convincing: anxiety arose originally as a reaction to a state of danger and it is reproduced whenever a state of that kind recurs."

"I believe that cure for depression occurs when the individual comes to believe that he is not helpless and that an individual's susceptibility to depression depends on the success or failure of his previous experience with controlling his environment."

Chapter 14. Therapy

42. Carl R. Rogers, from "Some Hypothesis Regarding the Facilitation of Personal Growth," On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

"I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence, as follows. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur."

"However, cognitive therapy may be defined more narrowly as a set of operations focused on a patient's cognitions (verbal or pictorial) and on the premises, assumptions, and attitudes underlying these cognitions. This section will describe the specific techniques of cognitive therapy."

44. Martin E.P. Seligman, from "The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy: The Consumer Reports Study," American Psychologist

"How do we find out whether psychotherapy works? To answer this, two methods have arisen: the efficacy study and the effectiveness study."

Chapter 15. Social Psychology

45. Stanley Milgram, from "Behavioral Study of Obedience," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

"Of the 40 subjects, 26 obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the the shock generator."

46. John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, from "When Will People Help in a Crisis?," Psychology Today

"If each member of a group of bystanders is aware that other people are also present, he will be less likely to notice the emergency, less likely to decide that it is an emergency, and less likely to act even if he thinks there is an emergency."

47. Muzafer Sherif, from "Superordinate Goals in the Reduction of Intergroup Conflict," The American Journal of Sociology

"When groups co-operate in the attainment of superordinate goals, leaders are in a position to take bolder steps toward bringing about understanding and harmonious relations."

48. Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila Ross, from "Imitation of Film-Mediated Aggressive Models," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

"The results of the present study provide strong evidence that exposure to filmed aggression heightens aggressive reactions in children."